published at 11:09pm on 09/06/11

More than once (especially during the recent AWS outages) I have found myself wondering what network hosts a given web service’s servers. In general, this process has involved my getting the IP address of a particular hostname, and then doing a whois lookup on that IP address to query ARIN to find out which network owns the IP address of that server. This generally gives a pretty good indication of where the server is hosted.

Well that process was getting tedious, so I finally added the following alias to my .bashrc:

whip () { whois `resolveip -s $*`; }

Hereafter, you can type “whip ” (that’s Whois Host IP) to get the network information. Let’s try it out: